So before the great pyramids the British were building elaborate burial chambers. In this really cool photograph you can see the nature of the room as it was originally built. This the famous burial mound on Orkney, off the coast of Scottland.

Friday, April 27, 2012

The modern form of 'masquerade' the folks of cosplay are well to all we gamers of the convention stripe. It began at Worldcon some 70-80 odd years ago and has gradually spread everywhere our fellow gamers and role playing enthusiasts have gathered.

Classic Monsters The Manual, print version, is rolling out of the Dens. We've begun shipping the kickstarter and pre-order copies of the book. You should have your soon and for those waiting on the sidelines, order today for immediate shipment.

Thursday, April 19, 2012

Impressions Advertising and Marketing has a new website. Check it out! Impressions has been consolidating TLG's books for 47 years now! Since the early d20 era! He also does Free RPG Day or some such thing!

Who ever would have guessed that water could be good for you in more ways the one? This study, costing millions upon millions of dollars (pounds in this case) no doubt, found that people who are in their first year of school/college and have a drink with them during exams. . . preferably water . . . might do better. Apparently such drinks have no affect on students later in their school careers.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

We received "Classic Monsters" later Friday night. The book looks awesome. Mr Hartsfield has done a bang-up job with a Castles and Crusades rendering of a metric ton of those old classic monsters found in those tomes and volumes from the early years of The Game.

Now we need a "Classic Adventures" line of modules to bring back that hack and slash and hack and slash and death and dying of those early games.

In High School we playing up in the attic of the apartment complex we lived in and had a "Wall of Death" where everyone would proudly pin their dead characters. When we moved out, the wall of death had many hundreds of sheets pinned to it.

The surviving characters went away with the players. Good times, good times.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

That's Potala Palace. The Smithsonian has an interesting article on the Dalai Lamas and some rather nefarious activities that occurred in the 19th century.

during the first half of the 19th century, the palace was the scene of a grim battle for political supremacy fought among monks, Tibetan nobles and Chinese governors. Most historians of the country, and many Tibetans, believe that the most prominent victims of this struggle were four successive Dalai Lamas, the ninth through the twelfth, all of whom died in unusual circumstances, and not one of whom lived past the age of 21.

So I was looking for some Rapunzel pics for my daughter to go a drawing and crayoning on and all that and I came across this. These are pics by famed photographer Ryan Astamendi (famed for what, I don't know). So anyway he got up some real look-a-likes and photographed some well done almost real to life images of the famous Disney Princesses. Of course, it would take a metric ton of plastic surgery to make them look exactly like the princesses, but all said and done, this was a good effort.

Last month, we were excited to share an image of a twister on Mars that lofted a twisting column of dust more than 800 meters (about a half a mile) high. We now know that’s nothin’ — just peanuts, chump change, hardly worth noticing. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has now spotted a gigantic Martian dust devil roughly 20 kilometers (12 miles) high, churning through the Amazonis Planitia region of northern Mars

Hitchcock had it backwards with his movie The Birds. The birds weren't going mad for some strange reason, but rather it was an attempted coup to return the world its rightful owners! THE BIRDS!...or in this case the dinosaurs. Seems that they've uncovered a very large feathered dino in China...well bone collectors found em anyway. They've long postulated...the archeologists, not the bone collectors...that dinosaurs are related to birds. Here's another piece in the puzzel it would seem.

Friday, April 06, 2012

Often confused as to the nature of items found, adventurers approach clerics and wizards alike in search of knowledge of many items looted and stripped from the dead and dying, objects stolen from the tombs of the dead and other rapacious and ill thought of methods of acquisition, the worshippers Makicoradario have declared there services open to one and all.

For a small fee, theses clerics allow people to pileup objects before them and they will forthwith cast spells upon them and detect magics amongst the pile. Come one come all. There are dozens of clerics just waiting to serve you. Some are even willing to travel with adventurers and continually cast there magics in an effort to detect these magical items.

They guarantee 100% detection of magic within a ten foot wide by fifty foot long cone in front of them, though not its nature. For an extra fee they even reveal whether the magic is strong or weak.

Worse than any fireball spell! The universe IRS super destructive and no act of congress seems likely to stem the tide of violent implosions, explosions and incenerative moments. Oh our little old universe, such a rapscallions.

A movie called Jack the Giant Killer is coming out this year. It looks pretty good. One can watch the preview here. The interesting thing about the movie, to me and at the moment, is that it takes a classic fairly tale and turns it into a more adventurous exploit and explodes it onto screen for a modern and more adult audience.

Throughout my long game running career, I have done much the same, though not in quite so literal a manner. For example, for the Death on the Treklant series oif adventures. I took a simple and calssic plot hook, rescue the beautiful princess, and churned a massive plot around that simple quest.

I hold to my belief that many fairly tales and such contain the germs of some very fundemental human explorations of self and one's place in society (as well as offering lessons on how to behave in society). To take these fairly tales and myths and re-expolore them in a game context can, I ardently believe, add depth of meaning to one's game.

Give it a whirl. Pick a classic and turn it into a new and more magical adventure. One not about the loot, but about the theme.

Cochem Reichsburg or something or other. It's early and I am having a difficult time actually focusing. anyway, I was looking for some inspirational images and found this castle image.

The castle was destroyed or damaged in the 17th century I think, and then reconstructed in the 19th century.

These windows would not have been an element of the original castle.

It's a cool looking place. It also served to remind me that the castle was used to house locals in times of conflict. Or, at least some locals, or at least that was the idea. I keep forgetting this aspect of a castle when laying them out. Well, there it is, reminded.